Charles Coffman

As we turn the corner into another century, art instruction is colliding with many new issues. At the same time there is more demand for figure drawing instruction than there has been for decades. The reason is animation, and the need for animators to be more than technically equipped to operate computers -- they need to understand the principles of drawing: perspective, foreshortening and anatomy. All of this pertains to the depiction of three-dimensional form and space on a flat (two-dimensional) surface.

These are the eternal problems of drawing and painting, and curiously enough, most of them were solved thousands of years ago.

Ancient Greek artists were so skilled in the art of realistic painting that it is said that a bird mistook a painting of grapes for the real thing. Few Greek paintings have survived, however, and by the Middle Ages most of the craft of drawing and painting had been long forgotten.

But the Renaissance changed all that, as an intense curiosity about the natural world, coupled with a desire to rediscover or reinvent the culture of antiquity, led artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael to develop sophisticated techniques for the depiction of reality in drawing and painting.

The twentieth century has been a period in which the figurative tradition in art has been continually disrupted, transformed, reinvented, rejected and reaffirmed, resulting in considerable confusion about how art should be taught.

But all the modern masters, no matter how abstract or conceptual their work became, were trained thoroughly in the language of figurative representation.

The reason for this is simply that learning to draw, in the traditional sense, opens up a universe of visual awareness and expressive graphic techniques. The masters of the Renaissance and afterwards developed amazingly sophisticated and varied approaches to drawing that are the basis of everything that has happened in art since.

Why you should start drawing

If you don't draw already, but have often wished, as many people have, that you could at least draw "a little" -- you should go

ahead and begin now. It is not impossible or even difficult. It's a bit like learning to drive a car; at first it seems impossible, but pretty soon one realizes that it's pretty much the same for everybody. A little experience makes it possible to achieve the skill and expertise necessary to move a vehicle through traffic. And that's a lot more dangerous than learning to draw!

You can live without driving, and most people live without knowing how to draw, but knowing how to draw gives one enormous pleasure and a capacity for participating in a new way with the world around oneself. It certainly should be taught in school along with the other basic skills. If it were, we would all be drawers. But it isn't ever too late.

Most of us who have been drawing all our lives recognize that it is not something that only a select few can do. Like many skills, it is a natural ability that can be developed with practice. Anyone can learn to draw. However, there are some things that make it difficult for people to really begin.

Why is drawing difficult?

The basic problem is that in trying to draw what we see, we have to translate from three dimensions to two and back again. For instance, a saucer seen from a certain angle is not round but elliptical. (That's why "UFO's" are like little ellipses flitting through the sky... for those lucky enough to see them...)

What this means is that the apparent shape of an object can be different from its actual form. A round column is a cylinder, but seen from the side it may appear as a rectangle.

Most people don't think enough about these changes in the shapes of things we see, and so when they try to draw a saucer for the first time, they make it too round, ignoring how flat the ellipse has actually become.

Even those with experience can have trouble with the exact shapes of things, but the trained artist has ways of measuring and checking if there is some uncertainty about a shape. And with understanding, the problems get simpler to solve because the same forms and the same shapes keep appearing all the time; spheres, cylinders, cubes and cones are like the alphabet out of which everything in our visual world is formed into words and sentences. And light behaves the same way toward every object, illuminating the side that faces the light, throwing shadow on the side that's turned away.

Artists benefit from the fact that we live in a very consistent, economically constructed universe in which the same simple things are used in a multitude of ways.

Drawing is really very simple

So because of the repetition of forms and visual patterns, drawing is not as complicated as it seems at first; one learns to apply some very basic concepts to many situations, always simplifying the structure of what we see to discover an underlying pattern that is simple and familiar.

These are practices discovered and perfected in the Renaissance, and they are still used today in fine art and all forms of commercial art that use figures. Everyone learns about them, and the only thing stopping you from learning too is that you haven't asked an experienced artist to explain this stuff to you.

Probably most artists would enthusiastically share their knowledge if only people would ask. But since most people think art is some kind of mysterious talent granted only to abnormal individuals, no one asks artists to explain what they do. In order to make a living, many artists give lessons. But the fact is that most people will never believe they can draw unless they find an experienced artist who will give them the tools and the confidence to do it. And so this is where we end up meeting: in a class of some kind, where you pay to learn from a practicing artist.

But your real payment is in time and serious concentration, and this repays you many times over. Art is one game in which giving and receiving are very much the same thing, which is why it is endlessly rewarding -- for the student and for the teacher.

But drawing is difficult too?

Not in the way we think -- drawing is easy, pleasurable, and can be effortless even. Learning to draw requires effort. Drawing itself takes mostly careful attention and awareness (as well as some innate sensitivity). But this is in itself difficult sometimes. We have to learn a special way of concentrating and being attentive in order to draw well.

What is hard about drawing is understanding the difference between seeing and experiencing space. We've all heard of "virtual realities". What does that mean? It means you experience a non-real reality as if it were real. What is non-real? The dimensions of space and time are imaginary -- you experience it in your mind only. Why can we be tricked? Because all our experiences take place in the mind's eye. Seeing is always in two dimensions -- the inside of our eyeballs is a screen with light projected onto it from outside. The two-dimensional surface of the drawing is no flatter than what we take to be "space".

If this seems bewildering, it is. Artists have known about this for a long time. That's why Michelangelo could make the vaulted, curving ceiling of the Sistine Chapel appear to be a window through which we see real figures moving through a cinema-like panorama of space. He was playing games with the flatness of vision and the flatness of the surface he had to paint on.

So you can participate in this "magic act" yourself -- it turns out to be much easier than the stage tricks make it appear. Anyone can learn to pull a rabbit out of a hat; some do it better than others, or figure it out more quickly, but that is all. The secrets of how to draw can be learned and mastered.

How does one begin?

You have begun already, a long time ago -- as soon as you opened your eyes. If you are reading this, you have a vast store of visual experience ready to be put to use. All that's required is awareness of what you already really know, and the knowledge to apply that awareness in practical drawing situations.

I am very interested in teaching what I know to as many people as possible, because I love this thing called drawing and this thing called art, and I have ways of taking you through situations like drawing a still life (inanimate objects), drawing from a live model (figure drawing) and even drawing from your imagination -- which is the real goal of artistic drawing, to draw from within.

I am trying to draw you in, and draw you out!

In English, the word draw seems to be connected with the idea of "dragging" or "pulling" -- which is accurate, for it involves dragging or pulling an implement (a pencil or other such thing) across a surface.

Yet the word "draw" has other meanings, and this is appropriate too, for the act of drawing tends to involve one in two seemingly opposite directions: first, the visual world outside, and second, the world of inner experience. At some point these worlds meet. And so we are "drawn out" of ourselves and also "drawn into" something that is very interior, and in the process we may "draw" others both out and in as well!

That's what I hope to do too. Contact me if you have an interest in learning about drawing, whatever your experience -- and once you begin, you can draw your own conclusions.

Making Marks:

A Short History of Drawing and Painting

The history of European painting is also, in a way, the history of

drawing. As the 19th century French painter Ingres said, "Drawing is the probity [integrity] of art". Ingres was in fact embroiled in a debate about the priority of drawing over color in painting, with his opponents lined up on the side of Delacroix declaring color to be more essential than drawing, which deals primarily with form. This divided artists between two camps, often referred to as the "Poussinists" (who advocated drawing as more important and followed the example of the painter Nicolas Poussin) and the "Rubenists" (who gave their artistic allegiance to the great colorist, Peter Paul

Rubens).

The controversy confuses matters somewhat. It's true that painting, which Emile Bernard defined as "a series of colors arranged in a certain order on a flat surface," is concerned with color more than with drawing, but even the arrangement of a series of flat colors on a canvas in an abstract painting requires the ability to measure, compare, and compose shapes. The fact is, a painting is comprised of shapes combined together within a circumscribed space.

Which brings us back to the issue of the flatness of vision discussed above. Some paintings depict complex spatial realities -- the paintings of the Renaissance for example. Others do not attempt to represent space at all, but merely an abstract harmony of shapes and colors -- for instance, certain works of Abstract Expressionism painted in the 'fifties. However, in terms of their actual existence on the canvas, both are equally

flat.

This paradox explains a lot about why people are confused about what drawing actually is. The cave painters of Lascaux created marvelous images of animals on the walls of subterranean chambers ten to twenty thousand years ago, and these are magnificent works of art. They don't show any knowledge of perspective really, but they do show a grasp of three-dimensional form: the eye immediately grasps and recognizes the image of a bison on the cave wall. This is partly because of the way the artist has used soft transitional tones along with hard edges.

And yet these are also beautiful abstractions; they are superb designs. The word for drawing in Italian was disegno -- design. So we can define drawing more precisely, perhaps, as a method of using marks on a flat surface to compose and organize shapes into harmonious patterns.

Seen in this way, the effort to learn and apply cumbersome methods of representing the physical anatomy of bodies through drawing is only one aspect of the subject of drawing itself. For the drawing must do more than merely accurately depict a body; it must speak to the eye as a design, as a complete visual statement with its own internal order. Modigliani's nudes are often not anatomically correct, and often Watteau's are not either, yet they succeed in saying what they intend to say: they become real, as real and convincing as the painting of the bison by the cave painter.

All three artists were consummate draftsmen -- whether or not their technique was acceptable by "academic" standards of drawing.

Perhaps the whole debate about drawing versus color really began in Venice in the early 1500s. This was when Giorgione evolved a manner of painting that relied less on careful underdrawing and more on developing the picture through use of color. His radical approach influenced Titian, who became a profound influence upon El Greco, Velasquez, Rubens and other painters. But Michelangelo, the great Florentine master of drawing, while acknowledging the beauty of color in Venetian painting, complained that it was "a shame that in Venice drawing is not taught!"

Yet even among the Florentines, famed for their beautiful draftsmanship, an argument arose between Leonardo and Botticelli about the value of making extensive studies from nature. Leonardo claimed that Botticelli's landscapes were weakened by a lack of close attention to nature; Botticelli countered that a sponge soaked with colors, if tossed at a wall, would leave a stain in which "one could find a very fine landscape."

Leonardo sniffed at this, but later adopted the idea himself, even recommending it as a method of invoking the imagination in his Treatise on the Art of Painting.

One could say that eventually, Botticelli's way of thinking prevailed over Leonardo's -- the Impressionists, Fauves and Surrealists seemed to all favor the "subjective" over the "objective" approach to making paintings. Though few modern painters would probably feel any artistic lineage with Botticelli's rather archaic, hard-edged tempera paintings, which seem rooted in the middle ages more than the Renaissance. It took Giorgione, a master of the new technique of oil painting, to develop an approach which could unite the imagination with the process of painting in a manner that gave birth to the entire modern era. One could say that modern painting really began in Venice around 1500, and that this was the moment from which the arbitrary distinction between drawing and painting would never again, despite the embattled positions of the Poussinists and the Rubenists, be quite so absolute.

So -- a careful reading of art history reveals a continual debate, verbal and otherwise, occurring among artists regarding the nature and aim and correct methodology of art itself, and never will there be any final word or answer. But one fact emerges and remains essential perhaps: to draw and to paint are actions arising from one and the same basic impulse -- to express the movement of imaginative visual thought in marks made with the hand on some kind of two-dimensional surface. There is no limit to the range of appoaches possible with either medium, as there is no limit to the forms of expression art may take. But it begins and ends with making marks.